Predicting the Movie Hits & Bombs of 2022

The scrapped A2 script has been adapted into the Avatar - The High Ground series of graphic novels which basically covers the return of the RDA to Pandora.

 

I'm not a hater, more of a dis-liker, as I think there will be a profound artistic 'cost' to the highest grossest of an entire art form founded on superficial fantasy. I like a good superhero movie, but no matter how 'dark' the creators make them, they remain a half step away from fairies and skittles and Pez Dispensers. 'Lego Batman' completely grasped this and ran with it. It was very amusing, and also a warning

It may be that the success of Avatar displaces the next David Lean. or the next David lean has to aim lower to get his or her film made. Thus conceptually compromised. "Rainbow Bridge on the River Kwai" or "Larry of Arabia"

 

Given that the movie will hit $1.4 billion tomorrow, your guess is wrong.

Only question is if it'll hit $2 billion... and I would guess yes.

 

No offense to fans of Avatar but:

I admit I have no idea why Avatar is so popular. Back when the original came out, it looked so bone stupid that I couldn't justify going to it (confession: I've never seen either Avatar and probably never will). My friends either agreed with me and didn't see it, or, if they did, thought it wasn't all that good. There didn't seem to be much in the way of online fan fiction, excitement about the Avatar world, or talk of any kind about it once it left theaters. It seemed to disappear down the memory sinkhole.

When they announced they were going to make multiple sequels, it sounded like too little too late. Surely no one would want to see this little-loved film get a sequel? Especially a three-hour long one.

Yet here we are, it's a smash. Can anyone explain to me why this particular film series is so special? Why do so many people want to see it? Every time I see a preview I half expect Scooby and Shaggy to walk out of the background.

 

Wow, really? Then they are really F'd. The whole Avatar thing is gonna lose a lot of momentum if we have to wait 23 months to see it. That's a mistake.

Well... don't minimize the fact that the first film made almost three billion dollars. That's reason right there for a studio to think about sequels, since it's the most successful film ever made in history.

Roger Ebert had a great essay in one of his books -- I think it was The Great Movies from 2003 -- where he essentially said <paraphrasing>, "a great movie is one that takes you to a place you've never been to and convinces you that it was real and that you actually visited it, if only for a couple of hours. No matter how fantastic the story, it has to seem plausible and have a sense of internal logic so that you feel like it's something that could actually happen. Ideally, it should make sense and have a beginning, middle and end, and the structure should follow the classic rules of drama. And you have to be able to empathize with the characters... even if they're bad people or have terrible flaws." (I think he draws a connection with The Godfather, where damn near everybody in the film is a criminal, and yet they're really compelling to watch.)

With Avatar, you have the added benefit of jaw-dropping visuals, plus a presentation (4K Dolby Vision HFR 3D and Atmos sound) that has never even been attempted in cinema history. Cameron set the bar impossibly high: theaters weren't even equipped for this kind of frame rate or brightness ratio or resolution a year ago. This is very, very cutting-edge technology. It's a far cry from Scooby Doo -- this is photorealistic CGI that is pretty damned amazing. I've said before elsewhere that Avatar is basically just a massive motion-capture cartoon, but... it's a damned entertaining cartoon.

I also think Avatar 2 moves along at a very fast pace, plus a lot happens -- there's not that many slow spots, and it's wall-to-wall with story and characters -- and by the end, you feel like, "by god, that actually looks like $350 million dollars up on the screen." So it's spectacular in that sense. To me, nobody has ever attempted to tell a story that's as far-out and massive as Avatar. I can imagine if Cameron trotted out his scripts and storyboards and tried to explain this thing 10 years ago, the studio execs would've basically said, "well, it can't be done." And yet he managed to pull it off.

I'd say that there's a lot of "epic" films that were sort of hackneyed and corny and silly, stuff like The Ten Commandments, the Star Wars films, or even Forrest Gump, where even though they were big stories spread out over dozens of years, with lots of characters, tons of dialogue, and all kinds of intricate story twists (some that strain credibility), it's still kind of hard to believe when you go back and examine the movie under a microscope. And yet the power of those films is that you get swept up and taken along for the ride when you're in the theater.

I would say Avatar is like that. I'm not saying it's a good movie: it is very corny, some of the characters are very stereotypical, and you know way in advance who's gonna win and who's gonna lose, plus I think there's a few silly coincidences and repetitive action (the children get kidnapped by the bad guys, what... Twice? Three times? And they escape every time!). But ya know... it's a fun film. And I don't say that very often. The Fast & Furious movies aren't fun to me. The Transformers films weren't fun to me. But Top Gun was fun. The Mission: Impossible movies are fun. At least the first Die Hard movie was fun (maybe not so much for the others). But audiences clearly respond to it, no matter how much a critic can take it apart.

 

You are absolutely right. They're already just about at a worldwide gross of $1.5 billion after only a little more than 2 weeks of release. I don't think they can hit $3 billion, but $2 billion is now absolutely possible. I'd like to see Vegas odds on where it'll wind up by March or April.

There's always cases where I'm glad to be wrong. Avatar: The Way of Water had more than 1700 people on that crew (plus 64 actors in the cast), and I'm glad to see their 5 years of work succeed. It was an incredible gamble by the writers and the director, and -- as I've said before (after my disastrous prediction that Titanic would bomb), "we've learned that you should never underestimate James Cameron." If the public gets a good movie, the theater owners make money, the fans are happy, and the studios make money, there is no downside. Everybody wins.

Hell, I'm gonna try to go back and see it in IMAX this week, "just to say I did." I'm curious to see how good/bad/ugly the variable frame rate looks.

 

have to admit , I am eating crow on my prediction

and the film is ok
do not know if it was worth the $53 for the 2 Tickets
but the budget is all there up on the screen

I would love to see an actual admission
count

just because these tickets are so damn expensive

it is more then double the cost at our locals then everything else

for Comparison at the same place and also in IMAX was $17.60 for 2 tickets

 

Yeah, the IMAX in LA is about $25 apiece, plus you gotta figure in parking and popcorn (and a small cherry Icee for me), so I don't see how you can avoid roughly $60-$70 for two people. But ya know... it's fun to see a movie this big in the theater nowadays.

Big fan of Spider, the human kid... though they missed a trick in not having his oxygen mask fail at some point, which was a cliche I thought for sure would happen. I'd almost guarantee it'll happen next time.

 

Do you like any of Cameron's other movies?
Terminator
Aliens
The Abyss
Terminator 2
True Lies
Titanic

if yes then you should be able to find something to like about Avatar 1 or 2.

 

I'm with you, the 1st was mildly diverting but forgotten before the lights went up. It was really just a pile of cliches.

Why is the sequel so popular? I imagine many simply many find it entertaining. But there's also adults who still play with battery operated light sabers, so clearly they are seeking entertainment other than what I would. Good for them they are being indulged, but if they ever grow up may realize Hollywood will not cater to them. They can look forward to a steady diet of hack screenwriters carelessly pillaging Joseph Campbell. Ice Cream sundaes and no kale. Or even olives.

As Vidiot points out, a popular movie encourages moviegoing, In this case, I suspect many repeat viewers. I could probably practice handball in the auditoriums where Babylon is playing

Related: I think the last 10 years of moviegoing kids and teens have been conditioned to well produced nonsense based on 'myths' rather than coherent narratives based in reality. So much 'magic' on screens these days, and so little original thought. And what there is, is often wokeville. That's welcome to some extent, but if Hollywood is concerned about all manner of diversity e.g. spiritual and political, they could start with their own content. Objectively, this country's diversity is in no way represented on the Big Screen. Perhaps it never was. But its annoying the Hollywood keeps congratulating itself on diversity. And no, Lizard People on made up planets in 3 D don't count.

As an aside, recently watched Peter Weirs "Master and Commander", probably as good a movie as has been made so far this century. Literate, witty well dramatized story, incredible cinematography. I recall first viewing in the the theater it was completely enthralling (without 3D!)A story that literally takes you to the 'far side of the world'. Thrilling battle scenes that conveys heroism and well as the terrible carnage, so a subtext of morality. Not a bunch of CG entities being 'destroyed' Maybe it wasn't a big enough hit to justify the sequel many wanted. I'm just hoping to see a movie at that level once a year. But I think Avatar has sort of demolished that hope.

So, yeah, maybe Avatar momentarily is saving an industry while facilitating its demise.

 

Interesting stat

UPDATED: Biggest 3rd WKND domestic #box office grosses of all-time:
$90.2M #StarWars The Force Awakens (-40%)
$68.5M #Avatar 2009 (-9%)
$66.8M #Avatar TheWay Of Water (+6%)
$66.3M #Black Panther (-41%)
$63.3M #Avengers Endgame (-57%)
$62.1M #Avengers Infiniti War (-46%)
$56.0M #Spider Man No Way Home (-34%)

 

I would say I'm not a fan of his I guess. I never saw Titanic for the same reason - it just looked so hackneyed that I didn't care how good the special effects are. I need a story I can get involved in, and if it's just three hours of things going boom I get bored really quickly. It's like watching over someone's shoulder while they play a video game. Billy Zane just needed a mustache to twirl to complete his Snidely Whiplash impersonation. And I was kinda a Titanic geek when I was a kid: I even read that horrible Raise the Titanic novel! So I should have been the ideal audience for it. Shrug.

I hated the Abyss, never saw True Lies, and thought the two Terminators and Aliens were OK but never saw a need to re-see them. So, there you go, guess I'm the outlier in the world.

 

Given that there are 20 novels worth of stories in the series, it's too bad this wasn't a bigger hit. I keep hoping that someone in TV land will recognize this and develop it as a premium series, rather than more GOT crap.

JohnK

 

I'm not necessarily insulting it for being juvenile or catering to the lowest common denominator. I like plenty of movies that could be accused of that. It's the success of this particular film that makes me scratch my head. Not just success: all-time record shattering success. People keep talking about the cutting edge graphics, but all I see are obviously cartoony blue cat people walking/swimming around and don't get the hype. Hence the Scooby reference.

Of course, they said the same thing about the Abyss: look at how amazing the water effects are! When I saw that film, those effects engaged me for about five minutes, then I asked, OK, what now? The column of water has a face. Cool.

And this is not like Spider-man or Star Wars, where people have obsessed about those characters and storylines for decades. This is a film that nobody I have ever known has waxed nostalgic about once it left theaters. Those stories did not seem to engage fans in the same way as the other tentpole pix did. Yet this is beating fricking Avengers Endgame, which EVERYONE I knew wanted to see.

I don't mean to be a buzz kill, but it really makes me wonder if I was born without some brain functionality that the majority of the world seems to possess.

 

Other recent movies that share a lot of DNA with Avatar, Dances with Wolves, The Last Samurai, Dune, Pocahantas and any other movie where outsiders invade and want to control the native population either to raid their resources (spice/unobtainium) or colonize their lands outright. Now set that story on a fictional planet, transport the audience to a new world and go from there. Marvel/DC/Star Wars is the same basic premise, some "evil" force wants to control and rule over everything. Then you have the Cameron factor of constantly moving movie making tech forward which eventually trickles down to others. It's cutting edge big budget popcorn movie making designed and made to be seen on the biggest, best screen possible. If it wasn't for movies like this the theatre industry would no longer exist, movie budgets would get chopped, the # of jobs in the industry would dwindle and so on.

Here's the trailer for Avatar 2009 - far too revealing imo but you'll get the idea. It's made close to $3B at the box office and it's the 2nd biggest selling Blu-Ray of all-time, it certainly connected with people all over the world.

 

I'm with you, especially re: Abyss. You, me and Martin Scorsese fighting for the future of cinema!

 

I think tech is easily the most important reason for seeing these films. Many people go to the movies for the experience rather than the story.

Secondary, the blue ambiguous characters are likely part of the reason for Avatar’s worldwide success. If the Navi are no one they are everyone, just as the Simpsons have been adopted by many cultures in the 90s, it’s very easy to project yourself as one of the Navi. It’s even implied in the title.

The themes are so universal that it takes very little imagination to see yourself as one of the roles in either the family dynamic or the war dynamic. There’s something in there that most humans can relate to and Cameron paints with broad enough strokes to make you really dislike the antagonists.

To simplify it, give them a spectacular visual experience and make it relatable.

 

well said, but I remain unprojected.

 

Fans had to wait 13 years after the first movie to get to the 2nd.

I think 2 years won't "lose a lot of momentum".

Or any momentum. Was "Star Wars" a damaged franchise because fans needed to wait 3 years between movies?

 

The ticket price , makes up a lot of ground. Admissions it would not even be close to Endgame

 

Well, I agree with your basic take on Avatar, but I feel exactly the same way about MCU films.
Now, Master + Commander, that is another level of film making. That was one I did go to see.

 

"Avatar 2" also gets a $$$ bump because such a high %age of ticket sales are 3D - and many of those are "premium" IMAX or Dolby. All are more expensive than plain old 2D non-premium.

 

Oh, get outta town. They're not that bad. You need to see more movies. There's thousands and thousands and thousands of films that are a lot worse -- even successful films that made huge amounts of money and got critical acclaim.

I can watch a film that's huge, very well-made, and has good craftsmanship and at least say, "wow... that looks great." I wouldn't say the scripts are haaaaaarible on any of those films, but there are aspects of the films that aren't very good. The villains in Titanic and Avatar are definitely very stereotypical, corny, and cliched... but the films overall are more than just the villains. I doubt if they even get 15 minutes of screen time, so there's a lot more going on than just them.

True Lies actually has some spectacular stuff in it, and I liked the fact that it's basically an action/spy/comedy film that never takes itself too seriously, and has some genuine laughs that made me laugh out loud. But it's also got what looks like some real danger, plus stunts that are so intense, you not only wonder how they were done, you wonder how nobody was killed doing them. My joke for years was, "Tom Arnold has only done one good film in his life -- True Lies -- but that still doesn't quite redeem his career."

I think the first two Terminator films were terrific, but they're radically different than the Avatar films. In a way, I admire the fact with Avatar that Cameron is passionately preaching conservation, protecting the environment, and the message of having respect for indigenous cultures. Now, you can rightly say he does it in a very heavy-handed, unsubtle, sledgehammer way, but I think his heart is in the right place. And I'll say this: at least the dialogue in Avatar 2 is not nearly as corny and awful as it was in the first one... but this time, Cameron had several other writers (actually a writers room) to help out.

Hey! Don't forget The Smurfs! I can't tell you how many people yelled "Dancing with Smurfs" back in 2010. (I might also add Little Big Man, which is an earlier film about a white man who bonds with a native tribe and is accepted by them and helps them fight against their oppressors.)



Cameron has a whole long explanation as to exactly why the Nav'i are blue, and it actually makes a lot of sense...

James Cameron Answers Hollywood’s Burning Questions In A No-Holds-Barred Empire Interview

He also goes into why they were designed the way they do, basically to give human audiences something "almost familiar" to look at: faces and tails that are vaguely cat-like, why their eyes are larger than normal, the flat noses, the pointy ears, and yet they're just humanoid enough that we can glimpse the actors' faces in the character. Clearly there was a lot of thought behind them, and for me, it works pretty well. I chuckled at the number of times the Nav'i hiss when they get angry, and I'm starting to do that to our Bengal at home just to piss her off.

 

I have a longstanding love of the Marvel characters dating back to seeing those crappy sixties cartoons when I was really young (like 4 or 5 years old). So for at least the movies based on those characters I have an irrational affection. But with the latest movies (Eternals, Shang Chi) I find I'm already less interested. And anything where someone other than Peter Parker is Spider-Man also irritates me. He is one of the few "secret identities" that I feel you cannot remove from the character and make it work; he IS the character, just like Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent. So, for me, "no" to Miles Morales or "Spider-Gwen" (man, is THAT a dumb idea).

Do people love Blue Cat #1 or Blue Cat #2 in the same way as I like Spidey? See, I get the impression that Avatar is much more about spectacle than story. If not, why is it I never hear anyone talk about specific characters from those films? I don't even know what any of them are. I guarantee you I know characters from other movies and TV shows I don't watch, but not that one.

 

Do you have Disney + ?